The BFI exists to celebrate all poets of world cinema, of the past and present.

I always listen to music, my passion and vice is music, I will be denied access to heaven because of the number of CDs I own, and I have gluttony for all types and colours of music.

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it.

The BFI exists to celebrate all poets of world cinema, of the past and present.

Betrayals during war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace.

I'm interested in stories which insist on a dog fails-to-eat-dog kind of world. I hate misanthropy, want to believe that there's a possibility that we might all be redeemed, that hope deferred makes the soul sick, that our humanity is fragile, funny, common, crazy, full of the longing for love, the failure of love.

Of course, like all film-makers I've been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child.